Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 15.pdf/637

 586

There is nobody more capable of giving his friends a genuine surprise than the eccen tric testator. A Frenchman, Paul Scarron, who bequeathed to his wife permission to marry again, to the Academy power to alter the French language, and to Pierre Corneille five hundred pounds weight of patience, was probably the most extraordinary of such will makers; but the race is a hardy one, and never becomes extinct. It is not confined to any particular country, age, or condition ol life, and in the Old World there appear to be as many curious and unreasonable wills made as ever before. Let us hope that the people who inhabit the North American con tinent are better balanced mentally than their nothing could be much more extraordinary in its way than the following clause in the will of a Frenchman who died in 1895: "I request that my body be delivered to the Paris Gas Company for the purpose of being placed in a retort. I always used my mental power for the enlightenment of the public, and I desire that my body be used to en lighten the people after my death." Another Frenchman, who was an enthusi astic card player, left to certain of his cardplaying friends a legacy of considerable size on condition that, after placing a deck of cards inside his coffin with his body, they should carry him to the grave and should stop on the way to drink a glass of wine at a small saloon, where he had passed "so many agreeable evenings at piquet." Still more unusual, if not altogether unique, was the whim of a rich old bachelor, who, having endured much from "attempts •made by my family to put me under the yoke of matrimony," conceived and nursed such an antipathy to the fair sex as to impose upon his executors the duty of carrying out what is probably the most ungallant pro vision ever contained in a will. The words are as follows: "I beg that my executors will see that I am buried where there is no woman interred, either to the right or to the

left of me. Should this not be practicable in the ordinary course of things, I direct that they purchase three graves and bury me in the middle one of the three, leaving the two others unoccupied." A German gentleman, who was a member of a New York fishing club, in his will re quested his fellow-fishermen, after cremating his body, to throw- his ashes into the sea on the shoals of New York Bay, where he had often fished. The will was carried out to the letter. Although it cannot be asserted that the ashes attracted the fish, the fishermen related that when they again threw out their lines where they had sprinkled the remains of their deceased friend, they made an excep tionally large catch. Some very rich men during their lives seem to enjoy the luxury of preparing at great expense the mausoleums they wish to occupy after death. M. Lalanne, a wealthy Parisian, went to the other extreme. He had a horror of anything like ostentatious funerals, and after bequeathing over a mil lion francs to the various public institutions of his native city, he directed that his body be buried as cheaply as possible—in fact, like that of a pauper. A shabby one-horse vehicle conveyed his body to the fosse commune (the Potter's Field), and the total cost of the funeral was only six francs, that being the charge for the cheapest kind of funeral under the French system, in which the undertaker's business is a government monopoly. Quite a number of men, both Americans and Englishmen, who have spent a great part of their lives in hunting have wished to be buried m their hunting dress, and this desire has been shared by at least one woman. An eccentric Welsh lady, who lived at a small place called Llanrug, was buried there in 1895 in accordance with the provisions of her will, which was in keeping with the local esti mate of her character. She wished to be buried in her fox-hunting clothes. The rest of her clothes and her carriages were to be